Buying Books by the River

On the book stalls,
serried by the Seine,
you can find almost anything.
And not just in French:
lost works by the nearly famous,
foxed pages of vanity projects;
“avant la lettre”, as the bookseller
himself might say.

Inside covers,
damaged and so stained,
people wrote almost everything
and not just fiction;
guide books to forgotten cities,
lost ingredients for old recipes,
“memoires de jeunesse”, or a textbook
on all our yesterdays.

And yet I know,
(jealous by the Seine)
each cod-Dumas romance,
every sub-Proustian digression,
is indelible, a marker,
a solid Kilroy Was Here
- and so much more than
I will ever have.